A BLOG

Really Rosie! and Really, Rosie?

My daughter, Rosie, started summer camp today. Her preschool class ended two and a half weeks ago. During the in-between time, we spent all of the days together, going to the beach, the grocery store, the newly renovated library, local parks, and biking along the Mississippi River. We made up stories and had great talks about everything from soylent green (she brought it up) to our fifth favorite color to the possibility of life on other planets (prompted after a viewing of A Wrinkle in Time). I was able to bear witness to her (mostly) wonderful troublemaking spirit and was reminded of how she (and her brother FWA) helped to inspire my creation of this blog back in May of 2009.

Being beside Rosie is always very helpful for my own thinking about troublemaking. Much like me, her troublemaking usually comes in the form of an insatiable curiosity and a refusal to merely accept what she is told. Because she asks so many questions and always demands explanations for why she must do this or believe that, she reminds me that engaging in troublemaking (or being around someone who is making trouble) can be exciting, exhilarating and exhausting. Indeed, troublemaking has its limits and shouldn’t be uncritically embraced as that which we should do all of the time. And when it is practiced, we need to remember how it can drain us or those around us. Throughout the past two and a half weeks, Rosie has prompted me to exclaim with joy, “Really Rosie!,” one minute, and then utter in annoyed disbelief, “Really, Rosie?,” the next.

When I was a kid, I loved the show, Really Rosie. My daughter Rosie was (at least partly) named after it. For some time, ever since I saw Spike Jonez’s film of Maurice Sendak’s other kids’ classic, Where the Wild Things Are, I have wanted to write a blog entry, contrasting the gendered representations of the troublemaking girl in Really Rosie and the troublemaking/troubled boy in Where the Wild Things Are. Hopefully I will get to that entry sometime this summer. For now, I want to mark the occasion of the beginning of my summer writing (now that the kids are in their summer camps!), by paying tribute to one of my favorite troublemakers: my five year old daughter, Rosie. In honor of her, I’m including the video for Really Rosie below:

Part one:

Part two:

Walker Art Center’s New Troublemaker

Absentee Landlord, a special exhibit curated by John Waters, opened at the Walker Art Center on Saturday, June 12th. I just heard about it from a former student (and awesome queer blogger!), Anna Nowak. Knowing how much I love troublemakers and making trouble, she posted a link to it on my facebook wall. While I haven’t devoted a lot of attention to Waters’ work, I love his movie, Female Trouble (I wrote about it on this blog a few years ago). I look forward to seeing what he has put together, especially after reading his description in a blog post about the exhibit, A Troublemaker Invades the Walker Art Center!!!

Here’s an excerpt (bold emphasis is mine):

Okay, look out you current tenant artworks, there’s a new absentee landlord in town, me. And I’m not going for rent control. Sure, the trustees left a security deposit of the permanent collection but I want to clean house, reward troublemakers, and invite crashers.  Aren’t all curators landlords who allow fine art to live together in a sublet for a while and be uneasy roommates? Or is it closer to a dictatorship where I can order eviction by deaccession if they talk back, balk at my orders or fail to entice enough public comment?…

Who should room together in the world of contemporary art? Can a Russ Meyer photograph go to sleep in the same gallery as an Yves Klein blue chip masterpiece?  Certainly, Sturtevant is secure enough to be hated, but is Anne Truitt?  Video art has “street cred” these days but can it ever catch up with a John Currin painting in art-history references, even if they’re embraced and mocked? Who’d copy from Richard Prince? Who’d be sloppier to live with than Mike Kelley? And better yet, who’d ruin decoration more than Christopher Wool?  Suppose an “art-terrorist” like Gregory Green was hiding amongst us? Do we snitch or shiver in welcome artistic fear? Would Fred Sandback approve of the damage his fellow roommates have caused or would he think they were trying too hard?

I like the question: Who should room together in the world of contemporary art? I also like the idea of works of art being put together as uneasy roommates and then imagining how they might negotiate living with (and next to) each other. It reminds me of my current interest in the idea of beside/s and the value of allowing different theories/theorists/ideas/experiences/identities to exist next to each other without reconciling or reducing them. How will Waters pose this question of who should room together visually? How does he plan to use his exhibit to reward troublemakers and crashers? I can’t wait to see…

A few sources to check out

After (finally) finishing my entry on more twitter hatin’ and conflatin’, I seem to be in technology/social media mode. As I start to think more about blogs and social media in relation to ethics, moral selfhood and care of the self, here are a few sources that might be helpful:

1. Jonathan Franzen.  Liking is for Cowards: Go For What Hurts (Also known as: Technology Provides an Alternative to Love”
One key argument he makes is that internet technology (ex. the “like” button on facebook) contributes to our narcissism and our refusal to move outside of ourselves to actually connect (and love) others. When we “like” something or friend someone, we just invite it into “our private hall of flattering mirrors.”  I want to come back to Franzen’s claims in his essay and really think them through, especially what they mean for the Self. I’m not sure how or if it connects, but I want to revisit Chela Sandoval’s discussion of love in Methodology of the Oppressedand read it beside Franzen’s assessment of love.

2. Natasha Singer. The Trouble with the Echo Chamber Online
Speaking of insular selves who devote too much energy to reading/thinking about what they like/what they are interested in, Singer discusses the problems with the personalization of the web. Here’s a relevant passage:

But, in a effort to single out users for tailored recommendations or advertisements, personalization tends to sort people into categories that may limit their options. It is a system that cocoons users, diminishing the kind of exposure to opposing viewpoints necessary for a healthy democracy, says Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist and the author of “You Are Not a Gadget.”

I was excited to see this article because I have been known, quite frequently, to rail against the streamlining of my experience–especially when it comes to Netflix and how they recommend films based on my daughter’s excessive watching of Barney or Horseland or Suite Life on Deck.

3. Parser, Eli. The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You
In this book Parser, who is the former executive director of Moveon.org, discusses the dangers of web personalization and the filters that search engines–like google–or social media–like facebook—use to streamline our internet experience. Here’s his description of the filter bubble:

The basic code at the heart of the new Internet is pretty simple. The new generation of Internet filters looks at the things you seem to like—the actual things you’ve done, or the things people like you like—and tries to extrapolate. They are prediction engines, constantly creating and refining a theory of who you are and what you’ll do and want next. Together, these engines create a unique universe of information for each of us—what I’ve come to call a filter bubble—which fundamentally alters the way we encounter ideas and information.

Of course, to some extent we’ve always consumed media that appealed to our interests and avocations and ignored much of the rest. But the filter bubble introduces three dynamics we’ve never dealt with before.

First, you’re alone in it. A cable channel that caters to a narrow interest (say, golf ) has other viewers with whom you share a frame of reference. But you’re the only person in your bubble. In an age when shared information is the bedrock of shared experience, the filter bubble is a centrifugal force, pulling us apart.

Second, the filter bubble is invisible. Most viewers of conservative or liberal news sources know that they’re going to a station curated to serve a particular political viewpoint. But Google’s agenda is opaque. Google doesn’t tell you who it thinks you are or why it’s showing you the results you’re seeing. You don’t know if its assumptions about you are right or wrong—and you might not even know it’s making assumptions about you in the first place. My friend who got more investment-oriented information about BP still has no idea why that was the case— she’s not a stockbroker. Because you haven’t chosen the criteria by which sites filter information in and out, it’s easy to imagine that the information that comes through a filter bubble is unbiased, objective, true. But it’s not. In fact, from within the bubble, it’s nearly impossible to see how biased it is.

Finally, you don’t choose to enter the bubble. When you turn on Fox News or read The Nation, you’re making a decision about what kind of filter to use to make sense of the world. It’s an active process, and like putting on a pair of tinted glasses, you can guess how the editors’ leaning shapes your perception. You don’t make the same kind of choice with personalized fi lters. They come to you—and because they drive up profi ts for the Web sites that use them, they’ll become harder and harder to avoid.

You can read an excerpt of the book here. You can also watch a Democracy Now! interview with Parser here.

more twitter hatin’ and conflatin’

On Monday, I came across The Twitter Trap via hastac and Cathy Davidson’s It’s Not the Technology, Stupid!. Davidson does an excellent job of critically responding to the many (and I mean many) problematic claims made in this brief editorial. I feel compelled to add a few my own thoughts to this conversation by engaging in some direct talking back (see this post by KCF for more on bell hooks and “talking back”) to a few of Keller’s statements. As an aside, I am looking forward to Davidson’s new book, coming out in August, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live and Work. And I am very appreciative of the great work she and the other amazing scholars at HASTAC do.

Bill Keller opens the essay this way:

Last week my wife and I told our 13-year-old daughter she could join Facebook. Within a few hours she had accumulated 171 friends, and I felt a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.

Wait a second? The title of this article is “The Twitter Trap,” yet he opens with a discussion of facebook. When did facebook = twitter? Like many authors who hate on social media, Keller conflates facebook with twitter.* They are not the same. Here’s one (very brief way) in which I distinguish between facebook and twitter (read the full post here):

How is twitter different from facebook?

  • Twitter is a public site. There is not an expectation of privacy.
  • People who read your tweets are your followers, not friends.
  • Twitter has a 140 character limit.
  • Twitter relies on crowdsourcing and how it is used is driven more by how people are using it and experimenting with it. Example: hashtags

In addition to these structural differences, twitter and facebook often appeal to and are used by different groups of people (influenced by gender, age, race, ethnicity, class, global positioning). While I am in favor of critical engagements with the limits of social media, those engagements demand that we provide specific critiques to the various media as opposed to over-generalized, hyperbolic statements that equate participating in social media to using crystal meth. While Keller’s flippant remark is probably intended to get a laugh, what it really does is shut down any serious (as in deep, thoughtful, meaningful) discussion about what various forms of social media do to us and what we can do with them.

*note: Keller does distinguish between twitter and facebook, at least briefly and somewhat superficially, later in his essay. However, his opening conflation still speaks to how social media is frequently represented as a monolithic threat; it becomes SOCIAL MEDIA as opposed to various forms of social media.

mini-rant: In addition to conflating twitter with facebook in this opening, Keller also invokes the tired old trope of the internet/social media as dangerous predator. Lock your doors! Shut down your computers! The interwebz are coming for your poor, defenseless children! Don’t even think about letting little Johnny go on facebook. Just like Jim Ignatowsky in Taxi when he take his first bite of the marijuana brownie and instantly becomes a drug addict, all Johnny needs is one click of the like button and he’s hooked forever. But seriously, I don’t want to dismiss the potential dangers of facebook (cyberbullies, privacy violations, posting private thoughts/images that shouldn’t be public, inordinate amounts of time spent in front of the computer instead of outside or with other people). Instead, I want to shift the conversation away from envisioning social media as a threat that children need to protected from.  We need to spend more time focusing on how to guide children in using social media effectively and critically/creatively. We (adults/parental figures) might also spend time learning from our kids about using social media.

Later on in the editorial, Keller writes:

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.”

Claiming that the only upside to using online technologies/social media is that it provides us with more time to do Farmville and watch/discuss “Real Housewives” ignores (or actively suppresses) the wide range of critical and creative ways that lots of people are using social media–like facebook or twitter–to share ideas, connect with others and create and document authentic expressions of selfhood. From:

  • live-tweeting conferences and workshops I was just following the hashtag for #racialequity and the plenary with Peggy McIntosh. See below for one of my favorite lines:

  • to mobilizing others to action check out mashable’s post on How Egyptians Used Twitter During the January Crisis
  • to documenting/sharing stories/spreading the word on the devastating tornado damage in Alabama and Missouri On both facebook and twitter, I was able to bear witness to first-hand accounts of the devastation and determine reliable ways to donate much-needed supplies to those communities.

Finally, Keller concludes:

There is a growing library of credible digital Cassandras who have explored what new media are doing to our brains (Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Gary Small and Gigi Vorgan,William Powers, et al.). My own anxiety is less about the cerebrum than about the soul…

Throughout the essay, Keller spends some time describing the ways that social media (and here he particularly targets twitter) serves as a threat to our souls:

  • twitter is an enemy of contemplation, demanding that we pay attention to it and other tweeters at the expensive of our own thinking and reflection
  • erodes “our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity”
  • encourages us to unlearn “complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy”

I don’t totally disagree with Keller’s assessment of the potential effects of social media. Yes, various forms of social media (I tend to focus on twitter and facebook), can create distractions and encourage uncritical ramblings. But, that’s not all these social media can (or actually) do. Perhaps Keller will dismiss my claim, just as he dismisses the anonymous “tweeter” in his article who suggests that the value of social media “depends on who you follow/who your friends are.” But, I want to echo Davidson in her essay and suggest that “it’s not the technology, stupid!” but the people who use the technology that plays the most significant role in whether or not twitter erodes the soul.

Also like Davidson, I was initially reluctant to waste time responding to Keller’s “plaintive, yet hyperbolic critique of all social media.” However, since one focus of my current work is on how blogs and twitter can potentially enable us to cultivate authentic moments of (moral) selfhood and help us to create spaces for deep critical, creative and ethical reflection, I couldn’t not talk back to his claim that social media was a threat to our souls.  I plan to spend a lot of time this summer working through what it might mean to use blogs and twitter in tandem to cultivate and practice virtue and to (a la Foucault) care for the self. For now, check out my post on the undisciplined self via twitter.

 

Oh bother! The Today Show Takes on Gender-Neutral Parenting

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For maybe the first time ever STA, RJP, FWA and I happened to be watching the Today Show yesterday morning and saw their segment on the parents who are raising their third child as genderless. I’m not sure what the segment was called, but the article on Today’s website was entitled, “He, She or It? Family Keeps Gender a Secret”. I must admit that while I have seen various links to the story circulating on the interwebz (several of which were posted by students from this semester), I haven’t really followed it. Therefore this “oh bother” speaks specifically to the coverage of this story on the Today Show this morning. There are so many ways that Today’s framing of this issue with this title (and the article/segment) bothers me. Here are just three:

ONE: Does violence through pronoun usage
He, She or It? Really? Using “it” to refer to someone who does not identify/is not identified as either male or female is not okay. This baby is not an it, they are a person. And contrary to what one “expert” on the segment suggests (1 min 50 secs in),  one’s humanity should not be predicated on a clear and rigid gender presentation (see J Butler’s Undoing Gender for more on gender and the “human”). By the way, this “family researcher” just happens to be the director of Focus on the Family, a “global Christian ministry dedicated to helping families thrive” and encouraging “parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.” Why isn’t this important fact, a fact that certainly influences his interpretation of the “scientific Truths” he purports, mentioned in the segment? And, wouldn’t it make more sense to have a trained scientist discussing the science behind sex and gender differences? Just sayin’.

TWO: Implies that regardless of how the parents choose to raise this child (or even how the child chooses to identify/present themselves) the “truth” of sex/gender* still exists–it’s just hidden.
To suggest that the family is keeping a secret about the child’s sex/gender is to indicate that some essential truth about that sex exists but isn’t being told. And, what is that truth of sex/gender, exactly? Is it boy = penis and girl = vagina (or, no penis)? And what are the implications of this equation for gender, if sex = biology and gender = social rules/roles? Could it be this?

We discussed these issues of sex/gender a lot in my politics of sex class this past spring. See my notes for more on this discussion.

*note: I’m writing sex/gender because they are used interchangeably in the article/segment. In the interest of making this entry accessible to a wide range of readers, I decided not to discuss the problematic ways in which the Today Show conflates and confuses sex and gender and how different feminist and queer theorists theorize the relationship between sex and gender. For one discussion of the differences between sex and gender, see my notes on sex/gender/desire for my politics of sex class.

THREE: Encourages us to morally judge (and condemn) parents by describing their actions as “keeping a secret”
The focus of the TV segment is on the question of whether or not these parents are doing the right thing and not about what gender-neutral parenting (or even negotiating gender in child-rearing practices) means for the child. As viewers we are being invited to morally judge them (literally: there was a poll with 11% saying what these parents did was “great” and 89% saying that it was terrible). I think that there are many other, potentially more productive ways, in which to approach this issue and to think through the problems and possibilities of negotiating gender rules/norms with our kids. In my queer/ing ethics class this past spring, we spent a lot of time thinking through what it might mean to engage in ethical practices that don’t involve judgment. What questions aren’t asked when we devote so much of our energy asking, Are these parents morally right or wrong?, and then answering by condemning them as terrible parents? Why aren’t we asking: What societal forces/structures have made gender such a problem that these parents don’t want to impose gender on their child? How does gender work? Could it work differently? Are our only options rigid gender roles or no gender? Why does assigning gender matter so much to us and why do we become so enraged/uncomfortable/anxious when someone’s gender isn’t obvious?

The Today Show article/segment speaks to a lot of different topics I discussed in my three classes this semester. In addition to the class notes links I offer above, check out my entry on gender-netural parenting for my feminist debates class.

Now, since this is an “Oh Bother!” post, I want to hear from you. What do you think about this segment? About gender-neutral parenting? About the parent’s promotion of a “free to be..you and me” mentality? About the primary expert not being a scientist but a “family values” researcher?

If you aren’t a regular reader of this blog, here’s my explanation of the “oh bother!” category:

OH BOTHER!: I am starting a new category this morning called “oh bother.” This category will include anything that I find particularly reprehensible, repulsive, or just plain annoying. The term, bother, has been one that I have adopted as of late in order to stop saying f**k (which is a favorite word of mine) in front of my highly impressionable kids (who are 3 and 6). Any resemblance to Winnie the Pooh’s catch-phrase is purely coincidental. (Don’t get me wrong, I really like classic Winnie the Pooh. But, somehow, I don’t think Pooh meant “oh bother” in the same spirit that I do.) Like I said, I started uttering “oh bother” about a year ago when my kids got old enough to understand and repeat inappropriate words. It seems rather fitting to use this phrase in relation to making/staying in trouble. After all, to be bothered by something is another way of being troubled by it, right? To bother someone is to trouble them, right? To be in a state of botherment (is this a word?) is to be in a state of trouble. This category is different from my other categories. The “oh bother” examples are meant to be analyzed by you, dear reader, and not me. I want to know what you think about these examples. Perhaps the “oh bother” is a request or a command–as in, (won’t you please) bother these examples for me because I can’t or don’t want to.